A judge in the UK has even stated that what the actions of the MPAA amount to is Monies by Menace yet no authority is willing to prosecute the parties responsible.

The whole “pay us $100 000 USD or we will sue you for millions” methodology is clearly nothing less than extortion and should be treated accordingly. Especially considering no judgement has _ever_ been made in a court regarding P2P indexing.

It is about time the law started paying attention to the needs of the people and dealing with the criminal activities of the MPAA/RIAA instead of just allowing them to continue to make ordinary peoples live’s a misery.

I’ve had advice that downloading in the UK is illegal. http://www.ecademy.com/ node.php?id=35200 In fact ripping is also illegal given the copyright notice on the back of most CDs. I’m not sure I believe this and again there is no case law to back it up and some case law around VCRs that may apply.

The essence here is that simply having a large collection of music on your hard disk is not proof of much of anything. Even having it in a directory that is shared doesn’t prove much of anything either. You would think, wouldn’t you that the RIAA would actually have to have proof of actual uploading rather than simply the presence of the files. If, of course, uploading to somebody else is actually illegal.

BTW. I posted this earlier
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=11259
which tries to explore the grey areas. Now here at http://p2pnet.net/story/6314

“”Unclear,” says Jason Schultz at the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) “but it’s probably one of the stronger cases for fair use if you only download one copy of the album to match the one copy you bought. ”

Deliberately unclear …….
The RIAA had the PERFECT opportunity to have this very issued “clarified” by a Judge in the Cecilia Gonzalez case.
Instead, they DROPPED more than one thousand songs from their “infringement list” after discovering that Cecilia owned purchased copies of them. That is why the final tally was only 30 “counts” of infringement.
Now the RIAA supporters can still say it’s “Illegal” although it hasn’t been tested. Heh, it’s the same way they claim “victories” for settlements.
It almost appears that the RIAA is worried enough about this that they wish to avoid having a Judge set a precedent
That’s kinda how the Gozalez “Loss” turned into a small victory. What they wouldn’t sue for was just as important.

Dreddsnik
Boycott-RIAA.com